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Gender Turing Test
The Gender Turing Test is a concept created by {me, right now... oh wait, actually it is a thing, cool I guess..} in analogy to the "Turing Test" whereby a machine tries to distinguish a computer from a human by their communication alone. Here the gender identity of the person is attempted to be established without regards to their chromosomal sex. For example, the set of questions: *Would you rather be seen as cynical or naive? *Do you tend to compare yourself to others more in terms of status or style? *Do you look at others more as competitors or potential partners? *Do you try harder to express yourself or to appease others? forms a demonstration of a 4-level binary GTT (Gender Turing Test). Answering with the first choice for 4 out of 4 responses might lead this GTT to guess that your gender is cis-male. Answering 3 questions former and 1 latter could lead to a guess of a male-identified person (cis or trans unclear). Answering evenly between first and second choices (2-2) may lead to a guess of even gender combinations (agender, bigender, quadgender,... {0,2,4,...}). Exact gender identity unclear. Answering with 3 second choices and one former, could then lead to a guess of feminine-identified person (cis or trans unclear). Issues User consumagenerica from everything2 forums points out the following key issues: "Mon Nov 06 2000 at 12:09:47 I used to think I could reliably divine the "real" gender of anybody I was communicating with online by their general style -- that I had some kind of inbuilt intuition or gender radar. This, I have come to realise, was arrogant self-delusion and pure, undiluted bullshit. All I was really doing (an embarrassing admission from a self-proclaimed feminist, this) was showing off my skill in the use of stereotypes: X is empathic so must be a woman, Y has a particularly dumb breast fixation so must be an adolescent male, and so on. I was cured of this illusion the hard way in the end, and learned (or re-learned) several important lessons in the process: * Constructions of gender are culturally specific. * Behavior which is counted as typical for one sex in one cultural setting may count as aberrant for the same sex in a different cultural setting. * Any remotely thoughtful, intelligent, observant person with decent general knowledge can disguise his or her gender online with relative ease and a low probability of being unmasked. * Unless you're actually planning a physical encounter with someone for the purposes of reproduction (and in a few more years maybe not even then), their gender doesn't matter. It's utterly irrelevant for the purposes of just about anything you can do online. * People who obsess about other peoples' gender, online or off, are boring. The question is not "are you {insert label here}", but "can we have fun together?" All of which is a roundabout way of saying I don't believe there can be any such thing as a universally reliable gender Turing Test. The Turing Test requires you to measure the actual responses of the entity being tested against your own predictions or expectations: and individual human behaviour is predictable only to the extent that it conforms with conventions or stereotypyes. Given that stereotypes themselves are frequently inconsistent and contradictory, this is probably impossible in principle. If anybody can think of a question or set of questions that will reliably and universally distinguish human males from human females, please node them and I'll do some kind of virtual equivalent of eating my words in public. " I hope to one day "node him" now, haha. He has some weird part about sexualising gender, but his early two points were what caught my eye. I think it's important to try to find a GTT that is culturally independent. Ignore all the stereotypes of gender and really see if there's a core truth to gender that is beyond all stereotypes. A completely unconstructed, pre-conscious gender. Something to throw all the TERFs and gender abolitionists alike into a headspin. Gender is real and there might be a test for it. But not a test everyone agrees one. That's impossible, because gender is definitely subjective. But that doesn't mean it's not partly objective. And an optimised Turing Test would focus on these partially objective qualities that almost no one disagrees with. There will always be some who reject the test, but averaging out it becomes an ideal test for some large percentile of the population. An approximate GTT. This will be part of the Song of Solomon. See Also Alan Turing, Turing Test Category:Gender Category:Transgender Category:Mathematicians Category:Turing